The Winter's Tale at Peoples Light & Theatre Company

Photo by Mark Garvin
Some critics call it the work of a weary playwright near retirement and others a brilliant experiment in stagecraft far ahead of its time. "The Winterís Tale" is possibly the most performed of Shakespeareís ìromances.î It's at Peoples Light & Theatre Company in Malvern through March 3.

“A sad tale’s best for winter,” says the doomed young Prince Mamillius in Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” and rarely has a sad tale been better (and more oddly) told than in this story of obsessive jealousy, ruin and redemption that has puzzled critics and pleased scholars and audiences for four centuries.

The opening night of “The Winter’s Tale” at Peoples Light & Theatre Company this month offered sad tales, ribald songs and dances, swirling snow showers (unrehearsed), homemade tin lanterns, flaming braziers, a man in a bear suit dispensing hugs and other delightful departures from traditional staging that will surely cause jealousy among area theater companies faced with trying to get paying customers into seats during the snow and Super Bowl season. The appearance on the same day of another seasonal seer, who emerged and proclaimed an early spring, did not dampen the spirit of this Scotch-American production, which emerged from many months of collaboration between Peoples Light and the Citizens Theatre of Glasgow.

Is it a coincidence that the same week British archeologists disinterred Richard III from under a public parking lot in Leicester, and the British government announced that it wants to establish Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon as Europe’s leading literary laureate, that Will-mania is spreading throughout our western suburbs, carried by a convivial troupe of players that have materialized at Peoples Light? For this production is staged as a visit by a ragged band of amateur thespians who greet the audience and serenade them on a rough stage outside the theater, before leading them inside for the performance itself.

Some critics call it the work of a weary playwright near retirement and others a brilliant experiment in stagecraft far ahead of its time. “The Winter’s Tale” is possibly the most-performed of Shakespeare’s “romances” and has been done in Grecian, Renaissance, and post-Impressionist dress, as well as a modernist BBC television production in the early 1980s that, according to critic Clive James, “was worthily done” but “one gets uncomfortable for the actors when they are surrounded by cubes and cones. You can’t quell the fear that if one of them sits down on a cone instead of a cube the blank verse will suffer.”

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Director Guy Hollands of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, making his directing debut in the U.S., brings a familiarity with community theater, wisely avoids the Beebs’s mathematical approach to sets and staging, and offers something completely different, a Saturnalian solstice festival that uses traditional music-hall, vaudeville and burlesque to tell the disjointed story of a king wrecking his reign with jealousy and suspicion.

Philip Witcomb, another visiting Citizens Theatre stalwart, has created a towering set that evokes British music-halls and pantomime productions, then adds a traditional thrust stage (open to the audience on three sides) that necessitated a reconstruction of the main stage at no small cost and with some unhappiness among ticket holders trying to snag general-admission seats in a setting usually reserved for long-time patrons.

Intentionally, the 22-member cast is an inclusive mix of ages and acting styles and brings the familiar Peoples Light ensemble together with local students and other young players with energy to spare. This energy Hollands employs to great effect with Shakespeare’s songs, dances and in filling the wrenching gap between the play’s tragic first half (ending with perhaps the most famous of Shakespeare’s stage directions, “Exit pursued by a bear”) and the almost cloying sweetness of the second half, when King Leontes’ folly is redeemed and all is made right. But the wickedly funny and more-than-half-menacing song and dance that Hollands and composer MJ McCarthy have distilled from the play cuts the sugar with a strong dose of Scotch whiskey and Irish vinegar.

Peoples Light veterans Pete Pryor as the bullhorn-wielding leader of the traveling acting troupe and master of their revels as well as the glib thief Autolycus, and Christopher Patrick Mullen as the jealously obsessed and then obsessively penitent King Leontes are perhaps the most visible of an excellent cast, but Jerry Richardson, fresh from his elastic performance as literally everyone in Bedford Falls, N.Y. in last season’s “This Wonderful Life” is again almost ubiquitous as the Clown, wobbling into the middle of every other scene to fracture it with pratfalls and gymnastics, in a close Beckett-like partnership with the equally-shaky Shepherd, played in fine slapstick fashion by Peter DeLaurier. Greg Wood as Polixines the King of Bohemia brings an intense and commanding sense of royal privilege to the proceedings.

Any production so favored by the gods of weather and circumstance that it can create its own rich post-holiday revel, can make us believe a shipwreck could occur on the “shore” of a land-locked Bohemia or that a statue of a long-dead queen could come to life, can surely bring some much-needed warmth to our own contemporary winter of discontent.

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale continues at Peoples Light & Theatre Company in Malvern through March 3. For ticket information, call 610-644-3500.